Alright, so let me tell you about this whole 9 of Swords deal I went through. Man, that card. It’s not exactly one you’re thrilled to see when it shows up, you know?
So, a while back, I was just completely stuck in my own head. Like, properly stuck. Sleep was a joke, every tiny little thing ballooned into this massive, impending disaster. You ever get that? Where your brain just won’t hit the off switch, just keeps replaying every worst-case scenario on a loop? Yeah, that was my life, pretty much 24/7. It was exhausting.
I wasn’t even doing a formal tarot reading at first, not really. It was more like the general vibe of the 9 of Swords just kinda… settled over everything. Like a really heavy, scratchy blanket I couldn’t shake off. But then, because I’m like that, I eventually did pull out my old deck. And guess what card decided to make an appearance? Bam. The 9 of Swords, staring me right in the face. I almost had to laugh, it was so ridiculously on point.
So, what was my “practice,” what did I actually do? My first honest-to-goodness reaction was just a massive groan. You know, that “Oh, fantastic, thanks for the reminder, universe, super helpful” kind of feeling. But then I thought, okay, the card’s here. It’s basically screaming what I already knew deep down: I was majorly freaking out.
My “practice,” if you can even call it that, wasn’t anything you’d see on some fancy spiritual blog. No special crystals, no hours of chanting, definitely none of that perfectly curated aesthetic stuff. First off, I just sort of let myself feel it. Sounds a bit daft, doesn’t it? But I literally just sat there and allowed all that anxiety, all that dread, to just… exist. I didn’t try to wrestle it into submission, didn’t try to immediately push it away. I just acknowledged it. Like, “Alright, brain, I see you. You’re having a field day right now.”
Then, I grabbed a really battered old notebook. Not for some deep, profound journaling session, mind you. It was more like a total brain dump. I just started scribbling down every single one of those crazy, spiraling thoughts. Every stupid little worry, every big scary “what if.” Didn’t matter if it was logical, didn’t matter if it sounded completely unhinged. The point was just to get it out of my skull and onto the paper.
Now, this wasn’t some magical quick fix, let me be clear. It was messy. It was uncomfortable. Some days, actually writing the worries down did seem to help a bit. Other days, it felt like I was just giving them more oxygen by staring at them on the page. There were definitely still a few nights where I felt exactly like that poor figure in the card, you know, the one sitting bolt upright in bed, head buried in their hands. Totally been there.
It’s like, you look at the card, and you see all those swords hanging over the person. They’re all in their head, right? They aren’t physically there in the room, but man, they feel incredibly real. And that’s the absolute kicker with this card, I reckon. It’s the stuff we build up inside.
Slowly, and I mean really slowly, things started to shift a tiny bit. Seeing all those anxieties written down in black and white, day after day, they started to look a little… well, a little less terrifying. A bit sillier, some of them. Not all of them, not instantly. But it was a crack of light.
The biggest thing I think I learned from all this was that the 9 of Swords, at least for me, isn’t usually about some actual, external doom heading my way. It’s almost always about the horrible stories I’m telling myself. The monsters are the ones I’ve created under my own bed, if that makes sense. They’re my own thoughts turned against me.
So, the “practice” eventually became more about catching myself in the act of spinning those tales. When that familiar wave of anxiety would start to creep in, that churning in my stomach, I’d try – and I say try because it’s not easy – to stop and ask, “Okay, hold on. Is this thing I’m terrified of actually happening right now, or is this just my brain firing up its well-rehearsed drama queen routine again?”
It didn’t magically solve all my problems, of course. Life’s still got its curveballs. But it did help me to dial down the catastrophizing a notch or two. The swords, those mental worries, they still pop up sometimes. But they don’t feel quite as sharp anymore, or quite so overwhelming. And that, I guess, is progress.
